I think I have enough trouble dealing with my own mistakes. But on top of that I have to deal with a multitude of standard products that fail. Here’s another one to add to the list: Today I was investigating a leak in one of the manual bilge pumps. It is less than two years old, but when I took it apart still it turned out it was the membrane that was cracked.

Now I deliberately bough rather expensive Johnson SPX pumps. And still they do not even last this long before the material fails. I guess as usual, the marine product manufacturers are laughing all the way to the bank….

Today has been full of bad news. Leak testing of the deck showed that ALL of the hatches were leaking. In the same spot. Not in the mounting, but through the hatch itself, due to a manufacturing error at the supplier. The leak in the ballast tank pumps that I wrote about yesterday was not fixed. In fact, it was not possible to fix because I had done a bad gluing job. The we started to look at putting the rudders in, and I discovered that the inside of the rudder bearings had been damaged in the sandblasting.

This looked really bad to start with, but Olari did a nice job with wet-sanding it, so the bearing surfaces were saved. When we tried to put the bearings in, however, it didn’t go in. Bad welding deformation. How this will be fixed remains to be seen.

The pump gluing problem was caused by me using only a standard industrial polyurethane glue. We took everything apart and brought out the more professional stuff, and this time the bond was a lot better, so now I feel confident that problem was solved too. Now let’s try to fix those hatches…

I have written once before about the Creative Pump Design Department. It got even more creative now that the pumps have been installed for real. There were lots of limitations in terms of pipe bend angles and mounting spaces, so in the end the pumps had to be mounted at really funky angles. But now everything is solid in place and all the connections for the ballast tanks are done! Actually this little project showed one of the strengths of building in aluminum: It is reasonably easy to add and adapt the structure when needed.